Fake Front At a Bloomberg technology summit on Friday, several industry experts spoke out against AI’s deceptive facade, warning their audience that it’s not the “magic” that it appears to be. This innocuous, magical appearance, they argue, leaves the public oblivious to just how intrusive and exploitative the tech can be. To kick things off, Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute, called out the CEOs of popular generative AI companies — including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Emad Mostaque at Stability AI — for hiding the fact that their products are powered by human grunts. “We know from reporting that there is an army of workers who are doing annotation behind the scenes to even make this stuff work to any degree,” Hanna said, as quoted by TechCrunch. “They are actually doing the labeling, whereas Sam and Emad and all these other people who are going to say these things are magic — no, there’s humans,” she added. “These things need to appear as autonomous and it has this veneer, but there’s so much human labor underneath it.” Data Churner As president of the foundation behind the encrypted messaging app Signal, Meredith Whittaker’s concerns leaned more towards privacy, something that chatbots like ChatGPT threaten to undermine. “I would say maybe some of the people in this audience are the users of AI, but the majority of the population is the subject of AI,” Whittaker claimed. “This is not a matter of individual choice.” Whittaker gave the…AI Isn't Magic, It's Being Used to Spy on You, Experts Warn